BE SMARTER! Make, play and learn with the Tinusaur microcontroller boards.

Projects

Below are some of the project that we are working on and based on the Tinusaur. That includes more complicated things like working with displays, various sensors, communicating over serial, radio frequency or even WiFi, etc.

The Gametinu is a small game platform that you could build yourself. But don’t worry, it isn’t that complicated. This circuit is very simple, and there are very few things that could go wrong. The “brain” of the Gametinu is the Tinusaur board that is powered by the popular Atmel ATtiny85 microcontroller.

Dragging and dropping blocks on a web page, generating real C code, compiled on the cloud and then uploaded locally to your microcontroller. We created the Blocktinu platform that will allow you to start with the programming of your Tinusaur microcontroller system really quick. With it, you could simply drag and drop some blocks to implement…

The BMP180TINY is a library for working with the BOSCH BMP180 atmospheric pressure sensor and ATtiny85/Tinusaur. It uses the USITWIX library for the TWI / I2C communication between the micro-controller and the sensor. The BMP180 sensor allows you to measure atmospheric pressure as well as temperature. The communication is don by I2C interface. The measurements could be used for various purposes including calculating the altitude by…

The MAX7219LED8x8 library combined with a simple scheduler to automate the task of outputting the buffer to the LED 8×8 matrix comes very handy if you want to write certain type programs, like games for instance. Given the small number of pixels on the LED matrix – only 64, and other limitation set by the Tinusaur platform, it looks like a…

IRRELib is a library for working with IR (infrared) receivers and processing remote control commands. The library handles the NEC infrared remote control protocol used in wide variete of devices today. The code is written specifically for ATtiny85 and is part of the Tinusaur project. As a receiver in the examples is used the TSOP4838 by Vishay. Sending and…

MAX7219Led8x8 is a C library for working with the MAX7219 display driver to control 8×8 LED matrix. It is intended to be used with the Tinusaur board but should also work with any other board based on ATtiny85 or similar microcontroller. MAX7219 The MAX7219 is manufactured by Maxim Integrated is compact, serial input/output common-cathode display driver that could interface…

OWOWOD is One Wire / One Way Output for Debugging library. It allows you to output text from the Tinusaur (ATtiny85 microcontroller or other similar), though USB-to-Serial or TTL converter (based on PL2303, CH340G or similar) and to the computer screen using COM port monitoring tool. Background I would’ve been nice if it was possible…

The Cartinu is a small robot car that you could build yourself. But don’t worry! It isn’t that complicated – this circuit, is so simple, that there are very few things that could go wrong. The “brain” of the Cartinu is the Tinusaur board that is powered by the popular Atmel ATtiny85 microcontroller. The Cartinu…

IMPORTANT UPDATE: We are launching a crowdfunding campaign for the Tinusaur OLED Kit based on the SSD1306 displays and this its page: https://www.crowdsupply.com/tinusaur/oled-display-kit. There is also a short video explaining what is this new kit about: Original page content below … SSD1306xLED is a C library for working with the SSD1306 display driver to control dot…

TinuDHT is a C library for working with the DHT11 temperature/humidity sensor intended to be used with the Tinusaur but should also work with any other board based on ATtiny85 or similar microcontroller. There are of course may libraries (sometime called drivers) to work with DHT11 and the more advanced DHT21/DHT22 but they were written primarily for the Arduino…

USITWIX is a library that uses the built into ATtiny85/Tinusaur USI unit to implement Atmel TWI (Two Wire Interface) which is compatible with Philips I²C interface. The primary source for this work is the Atmel application note AVR312: Using the USI module as a I2C slave that explains how to use the built-in USI unit as I2C slave. The source code is available…

There’s no UART on ATtiny85 so we had to write our own library that takes advantage on the built-in USI unit – the library is called USIUARTX. This work is largely influenced by Atmel application note AVR307: Half Duplex UART Using the USI Module. UART communication looks like this: References The source code available at https://bitbucket.org/tinusaur/usiuartx Atmel application note AVR307: Half…

I’ve just received Cartinu. I’m a bit underwhelmed to say the least. Exactly no documentation and no images about how to build (you haven’t even managed to properly document how to assemble the Tinusaur up to now and I’m talking basic information that a large part of you audience might be tripping over like: what is the component side vs. the solder side? The motor board is even worse!), there’s also no documentation or code demonstrating how to actually code the thing. And worst of all, the boards are of such a bad quality that the connectors can’t be fitted to the boards because the holes are too small and even way outside of “oh – this is a tight fit” categrory!

About the board for the Cartinu – the MOROx4 Shield, not the main board – that was such a disappointment for us too, but, unfortunately, we couldn’t do much about it at this point of time.

The long story, short:
We used a service called circuits.io for designing the PCB and OSHPark for manufacturing the PCB (OSHPark quality is much better than most far-east). Suddenly, without any advance notice, Autodesk – the new owner of circuits.io, shut the service down. We discovered that the holes are too small (could be also the OSHPark manufacturing) after we received the boards – the previous 5 or 6 prototypes were just fine. So, we did not have the circuits.io to change the design and no time to migrate to a new service for an app for the PCB design.

I know that this is not an excuse, but that’s the reality we have to deal with at the moment.

This is what I do when I solder the Cartinu PCB – I use Lineman’s pliers to push the male headers down the PCB. This is, of course, temporary solution.